HAIR-RAISING

Neo-Nazis Are Tearing the Furry World Apart

A putsch, death threats, sex offenders—just because people dress up like animals doesn’t mean their fights aren’t human.

Kelly Weill

04.13.17 8:00 PM ET

The war began when a fascist party and its armband-clad leader led a putsch. Antifascists mobilized in response. Threats of violence ensued.

Then the Rocky Mountain Fur Con canceled all future events.

The Fur Con is an annual summit in Denver, Colorado, for “furries,” people who present themselves as animals, from donning full-body fur suits to adopting “fursonas” for their character. And just as in the rest of America, a lot of furries resemble Nazis lately.

In Colorado, this splinter group calls itself the Furry Raiders. In 2016 the Raiders sent fur flying when they reserved a large block of Fur Con hotel rooms, sparking a fight that has lasted a year and led to death threats, allegations of tax evasion, intrigue around a suspected sovereign citizen, and the discovery of a sex offender on the Fur Con board. On Monday, Fur Con leaders chickened out of the convention altogether.

The Furry Raiders’ leader, a man named Foxler who dresses in a fox suit with a Nazi-like armband (no swastika, only a paw print), told The Daily Beast the convention’s cancellation all stems from a big misunderstanding.

“You could say a whole bunch of unfortunate events led to the particular issue,” he said.

Foxler claims he’s not trying to evoke Hitler, never mind his name (a combination of “Fox” and his supposed surname “Miller”), his Nazi-like armband (he says is based on a character in an old video game), or pictures of him throwing his arm up in a Nazi-like salute (an accident, he said).

Foxler recently tweeted at white nationalist Richard Spencer, and posted about “aryan” dogs online, though he says his group has no political agenda.

Fascist furries are nothing new, but until recently, “they were rare individuals who were more interested in uniform fetish than espousing Nazi ideology,” Deo, another furry told The Daily Beast.

But the rise of the alt-right has ushered in the #AltFurry, a hashtag under which right-leaning furries can organize, and the uninitiated can encounter more cartoon rabbits in Nazi uniform than they possibly expected to see in their lifetimes.

Empathy for the victim? Why does he deserve empathy and why is he a victim? First, let this story die already! How many ways can we tell a story about a cry baby dumb ass who thinks because he is a doctor he doesn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Sorry, but this is the way I have seen this story from day one. And you know he is going to sue and make a butt load of money.

The United CEO statement on the viral dragging video is notably lacking in one thing: empathy for the victim.